Imaginary Numbers

by McGuire, Seanan

  “All sorcerers are elementalists,” she said, as casually as if she weren’t holding two impossible fireballs with her bare hands. “Not the classic ‘earth, air, fire, water’ gig, but sort of physical forces. Heat, cold, gravity, that sort of thing. I got heat. So did Grandpa Thomas. His journals are full of useful tips about how to make your own burn cream from things you probably have in the herb garden, and how to convince the chaperones you need new sheets because of ‘nocturnal emissions,’ not because you set them on fire in the middle of the night.” She sounded amused and disgusted at the same time. “Guess growing up a Covenant boy makes suddenly becoming one of the things you were raised to hunt a little hard on the psyche. He was an amazingly good liar.”

  I took a step back. She might not have been bothered by the heat boiling off her palms, but I could feel my hair starting to frizz, and had no desire to be caught in what she was about to do.

  “Almost ready,” said Annie. The fire above her hands grew in both size and heat, edges becoming blue-white, crackling growing louder. She rolled her hands over, the fire dancing along the backs of her fingers, before flicking the balls into the car. They balanced for a moment on the seats, like they were going to go for a drive. Then they burst, spreading flames everywhere, transforming the interior into an inferno.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  “I’m getting better at it,” said Annie. “It used to be pretty random whether I got fire when I asked for it or not. Go help Elsie, okay? I’ll be up in a minute.”

  There was something in her voice that told me not to argue. “Okay,” I said, and turned and fled, leaving my cousin and her pet conflagration behind.

  Elsie had her headlights on, as well as the light inside the car itself, creating a safe oasis of civilization in the middle of the deep dark woods. She was leaning against the hood, texting furiously, when I came scrambling up the incline. She raised her head, nodded to me, and turned her attention back to her phone.

  “Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Kevin are standing by for our arrival,” she said. “Mom and Dad are on their way here, to make sure the scene is sterilized before they join us at the compound. Did Annie set the car on fire?”

  “She did,” I said. “She’s still down there. Why—”

  “Once she’s sure the car is burnt enough not to be a problem anymore, she’ll call the fire back into her body,” said Elsie. “She couldn’t contain like, a forest fire or anything, but something as small as burning out a car, the fire won’t have time to forget who it belongs to. That way, we don’t have to worry about accidentally burning down Portland or anything. Global climate change means we have to be responsible about our pyrokinesis.” She laughed, sudden and bright and absolutely mirthless.

  I winced. “He’s going to be okay, Elsie. I promise.”

  “Did you turn into a Caladrius while I wasn’t looking?” She lowered her phone. “Because unless you have special healing powers that you’ve never mentioned before, you can’t promise anything. My baby brother has head trauma. People can die from head trauma.”

  “He’s a Lilu,” I said desperately. “Lilu heal faster than humans.”

  “Sure, but we’re not superheroes, and healing at roughly three times the human rate doesn’t mean we can’t be broken.” Elsie glanced over her shoulder at the brightly lit car. “So you know, if he dies before the two of you get to talk this out, I am never going to forgive you.”

  “Talk what out?”

  A wave of irritation washed off Elsie as she focused back on me. “You’re not this stupid. Stop trying to be.”

  “Whoo!” We both turned. Annie was trudging back up the incline, her hands dark with soot, radiating contentment. “Car’s done. Fire’s contained. Let’s get the hell home before something else goes wrong.”

  “This isn’t over,” said Elsie, attention on me.

  “I know,” I said, and walked toward the car. I was tired, I was injured, and I already wanted to go home.

  Sometimes recovery’s not everything it’s cracked up to be.

  Six

  “Every relationship, good or bad, is different. Some of them are just more different than others.”

  —Enid Healy

  On the way to a safe, secure, intentionally isolated family compound in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon

  SHARING THE BACKSEAT WITH Artie meant riding with his head resting in my lap, since the seatbelt could keep him safely restrained, but it couldn’t keep him upright. I stroked his forehead with one hand, savoring the foggy glimpses of his thoughts that came with the contact. It wasn’t enough to tell me what he was thinking—or whether he was aware enough to be thinking anything at all, rather than displaying flashes of random brain activity—but it meant he was alive. That was what really mattered. Artie was alive.

  I let my hand rest against his skin, reaching deeper, looking for signs that the faintness of his thoughts was somehow related to the damage he’d suffered in the accident. Elsie’s words from before were haunting me, making it difficult to focus on anything but worrying.

  People die from head trauma. People die. Artie was people, and Artie had hit his head, and no matter how silly and overdramatic the thought might seem, Artie could die. I could wake up tomorrow to a world that didn’t have an Artie in it, and I would never have told him—

  And that didn’t matter, because I was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same way about me. He loved me because I was his cousin, not because I was a girl who liked him more than girls are supposed to like their cousins, even the ones who belong to a completely different species. All I could do by saying something was make it weird.

  Still, I pushed deeper into his blurry, half-formed thoughts, looking for some sign that they were anything out of the ordinary. What would thoughts born of a concussion even look like? Would they be tattered around the edges, or too scrambled to hold themselves together, or something else, something worse and more confusing?

  “—are you listening?”

  Annie’s voice. I raised my head, pulling myself out of Artie’s thoughts, and said, “Huh?”

  “You weren’t listening.” She twisted in her seat so she could look at me. “I said, we’re almost to the house. How’s Artie doing?”

  “Still knocked cold, but I’m not finding anything scary in his head. Just a lot of jumble. Pretty normal for someone who’s hit their head. I’m not too worried. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to tell if something was really wrong in there.”

  “And if you couldn’t?” asked Elsie.

  I took a deep breath. She was worried about her brother. Of course she was worried about her brother. Drew was enough older than me that we’d barely ever lived in the same house, and I’d still be worried about him if he’d been in a car accident. “If I couldn’t, if I can’t, then Evie will be able to figure it out. He’s going to be okay.”

  Elsie didn’t say anything.

  The woods unrolled around us, dark and tangled and so crowded that they became featureless, a solid wall of black wood pressing in from all sides. I tensed every time we passed another road, waiting for the truck to make a second appearance. It never came. We were driving on a virtually deserted road, deep into the middle of nowhere, and while we might not be safe, we weren’t in active danger.

  Artie stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that was almost, if not quite, a word. I stroked his forehead again, stealing glimpses of his tangled half-thoughts. Were they getting stronger, or was that just wishful thinking on my part? I wanted him to wake up so badly that I could be imagining signs of improvement.

  We were moving too fast for me to have any good sense of the minds in the woods around us. I would have known if there’d been a large gathering of humans—campers are surprisingly psychically noisy—or anything like that, but the smaller, individual thoughts of the night were slipping through my mental fingers before I could really cla
mp down on them.

  Then we turned a corner onto a half-concealed private road, and a new set of thoughts washed over me, strong and bright and terribly familiar, now that we were past the charms buried at the borderline.

  My family.

  Evie was there, as fierce and quick and eager to help as always. She was the best big sister I could have asked for, unjudgmental and constantly willing to take the time to make sure I understood what was going on. Her husband, Kevin, was with her, and while he had more of a core of worry than she did, he was still ready for us. There were two more minds in the house, both male, both unfamiliar enough that I couldn’t pick up anything more than the most superficial of impressions—I needed to meet them before I’d be able to get more than that without pushing. And I didn’t want to push. After the day I’d had so far, pushing seemed like a terrible idea.

  “Almost there,” said Elsie, and she sped up, taking us around the curves of the long road to the front gate like she thought she was being timed. It would have felt unsafe if I hadn’t known that she’d done this hundreds of times over the years, speeding up a little more with every trip, sometimes while actually being timed.

  The Oregon compound started out as Kevin’s idea. His mother, my Grandma Alice, hadn’t really been there when he’d been growing up; he and his sister, Aunt Jane, had both been raised by the Campbell Family Carnival, which was sort of like growing up with family, and sort of not at the same time. He’d been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, he’d set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like they’re not going to be crushed under the heel of “the Man,” only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and “the Man” was the Covenant of St. George.

  Elsie screeched to a stop at the front gate, which was towering, solid, and very locked. Annie hopped out of the car to enter the code. Elsie looked over her shoulder at me.

  “Everything all right back there?” she asked. Is my brother alive? her thoughts asked.

  When I was a kid, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the questions people asked out loud and wanted you to answer and the questions they thought so loudly that I couldn’t avoid overhearing them. There is a difference. Thoughts can be soft or loud, but they always sound exactly like the person they belong to. There’s no distortion, no getting drowned out by the sounds around them, no getting lost.

  “He’s still asleep, but I can hear him,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “I don’t know enough about head injuries to be absolutely sure what’s going on, but I’ve been with Verity when she had a concussion, and he sounds clearer than she did then.”

  Of course, Verity had been awake with a concussion, not knocked cold. I didn’t think saying that to Elsie would be a very good idea.

  Elsie’s thoughts were a roil of half-formed notions and questions she couldn’t quite put into words. She opened her mouth, a question starting to crystalize, and stopped as Annie threw herself back into the passenger seat. The gates began creaking open.

  “They’re ready for us,” said Annie. “Drive.”

  Elsie drove.

  The compound “yard” was really more the compound meadow: a long stretch of reasonably flat ground that had been divested of trees and major obstacles, but otherwise left alone. Sometimes the carnival pitched tents there, when they were in town and wanted to visit their extended family. I had spent hundreds of hours there as a kid, racing around with my cousins, shrieking, having the normal childhood that most cuckoos are denied by their territorial, homicidal natures.

  My species isn’t inherently evil—my existence, and Mom’s, proves that—but wow can we do a lot of damage when we’re not raised right. And almost none of us are raised right.

  All the lights in the main house were on, turning it into a beacon against the grasping hands of night. As we got closer, I felt Evie’s mind snap into focus against mine, the sweet, generous thoughts of my beloved big sister instantly soothing me. If anyone could help Artie, it would be Evie. Kevin’s mind came into focus a few seconds later. We hadn’t spent quite as much time together, since he wasn’t my sibling or someone my own age. Still, he was a stable presence, calm, steady, ready to do whatever needed to be done. I relaxed a little, my hand still resting against Artie’s forehead. They would know what to do. They would fix this.

  The other two minds I’d detected in the house were nearby, both bright and unfamiliar and subtly . . . off . . . from the human norm. I didn’t have enough of a grasp of what they were to understand the deviations I was picking up on, but neither of them felt hostile. That would have to be enough.

  Elsie whipped down the driveway fast enough to make my shoulders tense, screeching to a stop in front of the porch. Evie and Kevin immediately descended the brick steps, moving toward the car. Evie opened the door next to me, warm welcome radiating from her.

  “Hi, Sarah,” she said, leaning quickly in to brush a kiss against my forehead. The brief skin contact let me pick up more of her thoughts. She was frightened but keeping it under rigid control, not wanting to worry Elsie more than she already was. Injuries are common in our family. Injuries bad enough to leave a half-incubus unconscious for an extended period of time are not. “Mom told me you were coming. Can you keep your hands where they are while I check Artie’s pulse? I want you to say something if his thoughts change at all.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Mom wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, though. In case I didn’t make it to Oregon.”

  “I know, and she told me as much, but I’m out of practice at controlling my thoughts around a cuckoo, so I figured it was best to get things out in the open.” She leaned into the car, checking Artie’s pulse with practiced hands. “She wanted to make sure your room would be ready when you got here. We haven’t had a telepath in residence for years.”

  Not since I’d gone and hurt myself. Cuckoos don’t normally make good house guests. “Thank you.”

  “You’re family, silly. You don’t thank us for welcoming you home. You thank us for letting you settle in before we put you on the chore rotation.” Evie felt her way along the sides of Artie’s neck and skull before looking at the gash along his cheek. “You bled on him?”

  I nodded.

  “Good girl. That should slow down any infection enough that we can deal with it. No hospitals needed.”

  Taking Artie or Elsie to a hospital was always a fraught thing, since their blood had a tendency to scramble human emotional responses in negative ways. I paused, realizing that the three of us were alone in the car. Elsie was talking to Kevin, and Annie was . . .

  “Evie, why is there a monkey?” I asked, in a small, tight voice.

  “That’s Sam,” said Evie. She stepped back. “He’s Annie’s boyfriend. He’s a fūri—a kind of yōkai therianthrope. We try not to call him a monkey; he doesn’t like it.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” said the monkey—sorry, fūri—without taking his hands off Annie’s waist. He was easily six feet tall, with a tail almost as long as the rest of his body. He was also wearing jeans and a denim jacket, which made him unique among the monkeys I had known.

  Humans are a kind of monkey. This was no stranger than Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted, or than Mom and Dad, honestly. Love finds a way.

  “Sorry,” I called back. “Didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “Hey, Sarah,” said Kevin, stepping up next to Evie. His thoughts radiated joy and concern in almost equal measure. He was as relieved by my return as my sister, which was nice. “Can you get out of the car? We want to move Artie inside.”

  “Sure.” I
undid my belt, sliding carefully out from under Artie. Kevin answered the question of what I was supposed to do next by ducking in and placing his own hands under Artie’s head, keeping it supported in basically the same position.

  I stood, and Evie and Kevin crowded me out, attention focused on getting Artie out of the vehicle without jostling him more than he already had been. I took a step backward, and then another, wrapping my arms tightly around myself. I was still wearing Artie’s jacket. It was too big on me, and I didn’t need the warmth, but I didn’t take it off. Anything that made me feel like I was still anchored would be better than feeling like I was about to float away.

  How had everything gone so wrong? And why had the wind only been blowing on one side of the street? Something about that seemed wrong. It seemed like a threat. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “So you’re the mysterious Sarah.”

  The voice was new. I turned. There was a human man behind me, dark-haired, pale-skinned, and dressed in what I thought of as “mathematician casual”—button-down shirt, dark jeans, a light windbreaker. I got the feeling he didn’t stand out in crowds even when he was dealing with people who could see faces the way humans saw them. His thoughts were curious, wary, concerned, a swirling maelstrom of vaguely negative emotions that made him feel as prickly as a nettle under the questing fingers of my mind.

  “I’m James,” he said, apparently reading the blank confusion in my expression. “Annie adopted me after she decided my father didn’t deserve me anymore.”

  “He never deserved you in the first place,” called Annie. “You’re a Price now. Deal with it.”

  “It’s James Smith, actually,” said James, and extended his hand toward me.

  I looked at it warily. “I’m not sure you want to do that,” I said. “Did Annie tell you anything about me, other than ‘that’s Cousin Sarah’?”